Inuktitut both supports and reflects the Inuit world- view. It is highly relational and tends to deal in the concrete rather than the abstract, shying away from generic nouns. In their traditional hunting culture, it was less useful to Inuit to know there were fish in a river as to know exactly what species of fish and in which part of the river they were to be found. Place names, too, tend to be specific and functional. Inuit call Ellesmere Island Umingmak Nuna or Musk-Ox Land to signal to themselves and to future generations that the island is a place where musk ox can be found and hunted. Even today, when new words have to be conjured, these have a concrete, descriptive quality. The word for computer, qarasaujaq, means 'something that works like a brain.' It is, however, a myth that the Inuit have hundreds of words for snow. In fact they have about the same number of 'root' words for snow as Indo-European languages but the nature of Inuktitut means that to describe what we might call 'frosty, sparkling snow,' Inuit can use a single poly- synthetic word, patuqun.
Spoken Inuktitut makes a soft, rippling sound, like water running over pebbles in a brook. It is unusual for Inuit to raise their voices and it's considered rude to ask direct questions. Edie Kiglatuk is an exception to this, which may partly explain why she is such an outsider in her own world.
Sadly, some Inuktitut dialects are now in grave danger of disappearing. Where possible, I have tried to use the North Baffin or Qikiqtaalukuannangani versions of Inuktitut words in this book, but it is more than possible that some inconsistencies may have crept in, for which I can only apologize.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
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